Remote Control For the Hackintosher

22042009

Who said only Macheads – I meant “real” Macheads have all the cool stuff? MacBooks, “real” MacBooks come with an Apple remote control which lets the user control his/her Mac instead of using the keyboard and mouse. Being a mere hackintosher (who doesn’t have enough moolah to buy herself a nice genuine MacBook), I neither dreamed of getting the same feature on my MacBook Wind (MSI Wind notebook/netbook with OS X Leopard installed) and now, on my MacBook Mini (HP Mini 100TU with OS X Leopard as well) – nor even dared to dream.

Last year, I replaced my Moto Ming (Motorola A1200) with the Sony Ericsson w890i because I finally realized, or admitted to myself rather, that it wasn’t easy texting with the touchscreen Ming – puny little itsy bitsy letter squares that make up an equally puny virtual keyboard is not exactly what I’d call convenient. I’m happy with the SE w890i and its loads of features; specifically the “Remote Control” feature wich has always intrigued me right from day 1.

I tried this experiment on my MacBook Wind which didn’t originally come with Bluetooth, but with a BT dongle, I successfully paired my SE w890i with it. This is one example of the ease and simplicity of Mac OS X Leopard; the system automatically recognized the BT dongle connected via one of the USB ports. Even in Windows XP, I had to install drivers and an app that came in a CD with the BT dongle and even with all that extra effort, I hadn’t been able to make it work to the point that I thought the dongle was simply defective. I guess Windows just couldn’t get smarter, huh?

Now with the HP Mini, or MacBook Mini as I fondly call it now, which has an internal BT module as standard config, I was able to pair my cellphone right off the bat; the Bluetooth Assistant helped me configure everything and I was able to browse the contents of the Sony M2 flash memory on my phone to transfer my pics on to the MacBook Mini.

There was one glitch though – I had to make sure I set my phone to “always allow” the Mac, or ahem – hackintosh, to access it. After which, I was able to go use my phone as remote control.

Seeing the mouse pointer dash across the MacBook Mini’s screen and knowing that it was my phone doing that was just exhilirating!

Of course, like all hackintoshes, some stuff just don’t work 100% – I can’t get my phone to control anything else like play media in iTunes or Front Row. I can only get it to function as a mouse. Either I just haven’t figured it out yet or it just isn’t possible – regardless of which, I’m still happy with my MacBook Mini =)